If we want to be successful, we have to do things that will inevitably lead to success (or have a high probability of success). We should be looking for a “Monte Carlo Simulation”-proof startups. That means if we run a simulation, our startup or product should be successful in almost all of the cases.
(Short explanation: If we run a simulation of the life of a dentist a hundred times, he will have a stable job with a good salary in most cases. A famous rockstar will have wildly different outcomes. I recommend reading Nassim Taleb’s books on the subject of randomness and Monte Carlo Simulations.)

Success is often centered around smart thinking and good ideas. Certain things and activities, looked at individually, are just a good idea that make sense and lead to successful results. Analyzing and understanding the causes why something is expensive will most likely result in tangible results.

Contrary to that there are things and actitivites that are just bad ideas. Adding feature over features to a non-proven product is not only driving up costs but also adds unnecessary complexity and interdependencies.

This sounds way easier said than done. The startup world and product development are prone to delusions. Both domains are high-uncertainty affairs. Information is sparse, feedback is noisy, and biases influence our thinking and behavior. Taken together, these things lead to questionable actions and unfavorable results.

Without reflecting on reality and being aware of our delusions and biases, we engage in things that lead to failure. Starting a company somewhere for the sake of it, adding feature after feature to a new and unproven product, doing endless research in complex areas trying to gain insights, pulling through with our eyes closed, is just a few examples. The list goes on and on.

While there are many factors, I think two are especially relevant for projects starting out.

1. Faulty probability intuition: We have a wrong sense of probabilities. We love exceptions and think they are more common than they really are. Survivorship bias also leads us to have a rosy picture of the population that survived and forget about the masses that didn’t make it.
2. Non-gradual thinking: Most things start small and gradually unfold. We often try to do things in one big “swoosh”, which is like throwing the pieces of a puzzle in the air and it lands completely solved on the table.

By understanding the often unfavorable probabilities and thinking gradually by taking smart actions that lead to tangible outcomes, we might have a chance to tilt the probabilities more in our favor.